page_title: Rommel's asparagus
section_title: Atlantic Wall defenses
hierarchical_section_title: Rommel's asparagus / Atlantic Wall defenses
caption_attribution_description: Information added by Wikimedia users.English: France,Belgium - Field Marshal Erwin Rommel with officers on inspection of wooden barriers on the beach before the Atlantic Wall, April 1944.
context_page_description: Rommel's asparagus were 4-to-5-metre logs which the Axis placed in the fields and meadows of Normandy to cause damage to the expected invasion of Allied military gliders and paratroopers. Also known in German as Holzpfähle, the wooden defenses were placed in early 1944 in coastal areas of France and the Netherlands against airlanding infantry. Rommelspargel took their name from Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, who ordered their design and usage; Rommel himself called the defensive concept Luftlandehindernis.
  Though Rommel's forces placed more than a million wooden poles in fields, their effect on the invasion of Normandy was inconsequential. Later, in the French Riviera, only about 300 Allied casualties were attributed to the tactic.
  Rommel's asparagus refers specifically to wooden poles used against aerial invasion. The term has also been used to describe wooden logs set into the beaches of the English Channel and the Atlantic Ocean to disrupt amphibious landings of troops. Testing found these wooden defenses too weak to stop boats, and they were largely abandoned in favor of Hemmbalken and other beach defenses.
context_section_description: Before Rommel was assigned defense of the Atlantic Wall, obstacles to amphibious landing were being built upon the beaches of Belgium and France. On February 3, 1944 during a visit to the beach at Neufchâtel-Hardelot, Rommel was shown a method by which local troops employed a high pressure water hose to quickly create a hole in beach sand, one which could be used to set high wooden stakes (Hochpfähle) into the beach as an obstacle to landing craft. The water hose method took three minutes, fifteen times faster than using a pile driver. Rommel ordered such methods to be used to place wooden beams, metal rails and other obstructions along the beaches of Normandy. Nearly 11,000 were emplaced in the south part of Normandy's coastline where the Allies would eventually land.
  However, a test against the wooden stakes in mid-February showed them to be too weak to stop a captured British landing craft. As a result, a stronger design was contrived using a larger beam set at an angle and reinforced with other thick beams, most topped with a Teller mine. The more robust obstacles were called Hemmbalken, or "obstruction beams". The original upright beams were left in place – some were topped with mines for greater effectiveness. The Hochpfähle have sometimes been called "Rommel's asparagus" or Rommelspargel for their close resemblance to the air-landing obstructions.
  U.S. Navy Commander Edward Ellsberg said of the various Atlantic Wall obstacles, "Rommel had thoroughly muddled our plans. Attacking at high tide as we had intended, we'd never get enough troops in over those obstacles..." Instead the Allies landed at low tide, which increased the length of the beach to be crossed but uncovered and revealed the obstacles, greatly reducing their effectiveness.
caption: Rommel inspects an installation of obstruction beams (Hemmbalken) in April 1944
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